


Restoration

by Skyler10



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Memory Loss, Romance, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-24
Updated: 2015-09-24
Packaged: 2018-04-23 03:25:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4861211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skyler10/pseuds/Skyler10
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on the prompt: Tentoo loses part of his memories after an accident at Torchwood. He believes that he somehow landed at Torchwood before the Battle of Canary Wharf and he’s now their prisoner. By the time Rose reaches the infirmary, the Doctor has worked himself into a rage and three security guards are struggling to hold him down. Rose goes to comfort the Doctor, unaware of his missing memories and the Doctor is more than a little surprised, although he is far from complaining.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Restoration

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to badwolfxoncomingstorm on Tumblr who posted this prompt! This was supposed to be a tiny drabble, but you know how that works out.

She was a little worried. He hadn’t responded to her text. It wasn’t a big deal. He was probably just busy. Or something.  
  
But every time he goes on a mission without her or news travels to her office that he’s been experimenting with something dangerous or a story leaks through about a near-fatal explosion, she can’t help it.  
  
Flashes of gold mingle with the (alternate) reality of seeing him dead on a stretcher. Alien guns pointed at their heads, his hand being chopped off by the Sycorax, threats of execution and destruction, being informed of his death while orbiting a black hole… memories too real to be nightmares, yet that haunt her waking and sleeping all the same.  
  
She can’t lose him again.  
  
She can’t.  
  
So when the call eventually came that there was an accident, that she needed to come right away, she expected the worst.  
  
A worst.  
  
Not this worst.  
  
She knocked over a rolling cart as she turned a corner in the infirmary, not looking back as the sound of metal crashing to the floor echoed amidst beeps and intercom pages. She burst through the door before they can stop her, explain, prepare her for what lies ahead.  
  
Instead of the unconscious fiancé she expected to find, hooked up to wires and tubes, a raging fight between four men awaited her. Two burly guards shouting and holding him back. One part-Time Lord ranting and struggling and fumbling for his sonic on the bed stand. Three nurses were pushed to the side as another security guard stepped into the room.  
  
“Doctor!” she yelled over the ruckus. He either ignored her or couldn’t focus on her.  
  
“Unhand me!” he demanded to three guards. “I don’t know how you brought me here, but you WILL LET. ME. GO!”  
  
An impossible wave of calm shuddered over the room as he locked eyes with her. The Oncoming Storm shifted in intent, from fury to fear.  
  
“Rose,” he whispered. He paled. “How? How are you here? You can’t…”  
  
_Like he’s seen a ghost._  
  
As soon as Rose thought the cliché, she knew. Somehow, she just… knew. But her rational mind wouldn’t let her instincts believe it.  
  
“Doctor, it’s me. I’m going to take you home, alright?”  
  
For a moment he appeared relieved. But not relieved to see his fiancée. Relieved that his angel had come to escort him to eternity.  
  
She thought she might throw up.  
  
He swallowed as he approached her, cautiously, but accepting of his fate. She reached out a hand. If he would only touch her, she could use their fledgling bond to find out what’s going on. He caught a glint of the light as it hit her diamond. The Storm morphed into a tempest once more.  
  
“You’re not.” He shook his head as he struggled with the words, now hoarse from all the shouting but not over yet. “How dare you. How DARE you use her face?! Is nothing sacred?”  
  
He snarled, the nurses cowered, but she faced him in all his intensity as she always had. He would never hurt her.  
  
“Take me prisoner, fine. I know what you do here. _Torchwood._ ” He spit out the word like the vile poison it once was to him. “But you will. Not. Bring her into this. Understood? Because you should know, whoever you really are, that when Rose Tyler is involved, I become much less forgiving toward anyone who might try to hurt her or use her against me.”  
  
The confused nurses fled the room. The security guards stood back, ever vigilant. The Doctor and Rose stepped in closer, him in malice, her in desperation.  
  
“Doctor. I don’t know what’s happened to you,” she soothed. “But please believe me. No one is holding you prisoner. It’s really me.”  
  
“No, I won’t. I can’t.” He shut his eyes against any mind games she might be trying to play on him. Hypnotism or whatever else, she couldn’t guess.  
  
“I think you may have lost your memories, correct?” She looked over to the guards for confirmation. One gave a short nod while the others softened briefly into sympathy.   
  
She wanted to thank them. She wanted to confront the physicians who couldn’t or didn’t solve this or explain it to him well enough or whatever had happened before she entered the room. She wanted to strangle him for doing something so dangerous to do this much damage, whatever it was.  
  
But most of all, she wanted her Doctor back.  
  
“Please, please believe me,” she whimpered as the tears came. He remained hardened against her heart breaking. “Oh god, don’t be gone.”  
  
“You know how I know this is all an act?” he called out rudely. “My Rose would never wear THIS.”  
  
He grabbed her hand and held up her ring. As he did, she saw her opportunity. Starting with that morning’s wedding planning over breakfast, then on to their last date night, his proposal, waking up together, family dinners at the mansion, all the way back in time to their kiss at Bad Wolf Bay, she flooded their bond with memories as best she could. He had still been teaching her, and the link was still weak, but she apparently succeeded enough that the message got through.  
  
He was panting as he stepped back, dropping her hand with a flop back down to her side. She swayed a bit at the lack of contact after such a rushed telepathic encounter, but didn’t miss a beat in her reply to his accusation.  
  
“I would if it were yours.”  
  
His mouth moved in silence. His wildest dreams at his fingertips. Too good to be true, the expression on his face read. Far too impossible.  
  
“Still don’t believe me?” she asked. “Check your internal systems. One heart. One life. Human aging.”  
  
He went through each as she listed them off.  
  
“And in your head. What’s there?” She hated to do this to him. To call attention to the missing hum of a mature TARDIS when theirs couldn’t fill the void yet. She knew from their brief telepathy lessons just how much it ached in his mind.  
  
“You,” he stuttered out.  
  
“What?” She hadn’t been expecting that.  
  
“You’re there. The same you that’s here, right now. Rose… how?”  
  
He blinked as the situation sunk in a bit.  
  
“It’s a bit of a long story,” she chuckled, more from relief than humor. “But… I came back.”  
  
He smiled a bit, just a tiny one, nothing like the magnitude of the one that had followed the last time she had said those words in answer to that question. She continued, refusing to dwell on the memory.  
  
“Then you came back here, with me, to Pete’s World. Haven’t called it that in a long time though.” She ran a hand through her hair and exhaled, adrenaline deflating into questions. Questions that required a different sort of doctor. One who had all his memories of the day.  
  
“As much as I want that to be true… Doesn’t sound like me.” He was already mourning, she could tell, grieving the death of this fantasy before it was eventually dissolved by some trick or another.  
  
“You didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. Neither of us really did.” Though she wouldn’t change a thing now, she shrugged to hide the hurt the other him had inflicted by dropping them off with no goodbye. “You split into two, as you saw there at the end of the… projection… mind image. Thing. The other you is still out there. On the other side.”  
  
He nodded to acknowledge this made sense, though he still wasn’t pulling her into his arms yet. Where she desperately wanted to be.  
  
“And we’re?” He gestured between them. She couldn’t help but smile.  
  
“Getting married. Doing domestic. Growing a TARDIS.”  
  
He stared in astonishment, but didn’t have time to form words even if he could have responded to that, as Dr. Owen Harper slammed open the door of the exam room.  
  
“My, my, what happened in here?” he asked, dripping with sarcasm as always.  
  
Rose took in the damage for the first time. It looked as if a bull had run rampant through the medical setting. Or a confused, wounded, threatened Time Lord.  
  
“YOU,” she rounded on the physician. “Where were you when he woke up? What the hell happened to him?! Why didn’t anyone tell him what was going on?”  
  
“One question at a time, love,” Owen patronized. “First, I can’t sit with all my unconscious patients. Wouldn’t get anything done around here. Second, your boyfriend had a bit of a run in with an alien bomb. Probably thought it was a musical instrument, if I had to guess. Played that set of panpipes just right so it set off the activation code. Third and last, have you ever seen an amnesiac? He took one look the Torchwood logo and set off ripping apart some very valuable equipment and popped one on the first guard that came in to hold ‘im down.”  
  
“Sorry about that,” Rose apologized for the Doctor, who was leveling an “intimidating glare” at Owen. “What do we need to know? Can I take him home? And please, Owen, please, tell me it’s just temporary. He’s coming back, right?”  
  
The plea must have broken something within his sarcastic comeback because he stepped out of his usual character for a bit.  
  
“It’s going to be alright, Rose, really,” Owen reassured. He placed a hand on her shoulder, but the Doctor growled, so he quickly removed it. “It’s hard to say, but it might be a few hours or it might be a week. We know he heals faster than most, but he’s also just… different. More up there to lose, in some ways.”  
  
Rose fought back relieved tears as she nodded. He was going to be ok.  
  
“Here.” Owen was handing her a prescription. “Twice a day, morning and night. Keep him home. Preferably inside. Nothing too major, no heavy lifting, no saving the world, you know the drill. Just keep him safe and away from any further trauma and your bloody alien should be back to blow us up again soon.”  
  
“Thank you.” She bowed her head in acknowledgement of his (mostly) withheld disregard for bedside manner. In a gesture of command and reassurance, she took the Doctor’s hand. She pulled him along until they were out of the building.  
  
He stopped and stared up at the zeppelins hovering in the sky.  
  
“Believe me yet?” Rose couldn’t help but smirk.  
  
“Starting to, yeah,” he admitted with a laugh of incredulity.  
  
“C’mon, car’s over here.”  
  
“Blue Audi. Your dad bought it for you… when we came back.”  
  
Her head shot up to see his brow was drawn in concentration.  
  
“That’s the one.” A genuine smile stretched across her face. This was going to be hard, no doubt, and her stomach coiled in dread at keeping HIM safe and indoors for a week, but he really was going to come back to her. Fully restored, just as they had been so many times before. 


End file.
